re: #142 EPR-radar

Being scared is no excuse for objectively stupid thinking that can only increase the risk.

And the point of a terror weapon is to put people into a mental place where compliance seems safer.

I’m not agreeing with Hayes, but I don’t think the tweet merits the intensity.

I’m also being a two very specific kinds of dickhead:

On one hand I’m gesturing towards the fact that Americans are suddenly having to negotiate the kind of fear they used to inflict on others. I find it interesting because it appears to be yet another demonstration that fascism is the violence of the imperial periphery returning to the core. Cold War fear of annihilation was textured by MAD; we’re now in a different era where limited nuclear exchange is feasible, the hegemonies aren’t clear. The whole strikes me as half a sigma from the bell curve of “well, I didn’t expect the face-eating leopards to eat my face.”

On the other I’m pointing out that social media is built to create endless chains of reaction, and does so via the twin engines of (1) being a shitty media in which it’s easy to misread, decontexualize a statement, or attribute the quality of truth to something said casually because everyone’s responding fast in what’s effectively a room of shouting attention-seekers, (2) specifically providing people with shit to be upset about.

The tweet Hayes is responding to is doing some tedious moralizing about another response to something else that amounts to boomer griping: “look at these tweeting kids how indifferent they are to nuclear war, aren’t they dumb and can’t solve all our problems.” Hayes is going a personal vector of “I guess the only thing we could do is…” in response to that initial thought-smear; it’s not a smart response (the smart response being to delete Twitter) but it’s pertinent to the constrained hypothetical moralized the boor has stated: this is a possible “do something” the US could do.

His next tweet is the qualifier that it’s not a good idea.

It’s just…not worth the energy to condemn because it’s just parsing one tweet—and that tweet reveals something far more interesting since it’s actually an unintentionally revelatory response demonstrating how nuclear terror functions and how Americans just kind of haven’t digested the reality that somebody could get nuked for, like, piddly little nothing. The boomer-brain he’s responding to is still thinking in Cold War terms where the it’s all grand ideological motives and the bad guy gives a shit about their nation and also assumes they’ll be second strike; we’re in a brave new world of Dudes with Nukes Who Say They’ll Do First Strike and people are not going to react well.

Mind you, none of that is interesting as the other Americans who are really excited by the idea of showing naked dominance through nukes and thus still like and “understand” Putin…